The Symmetry of Fish

Advance praise for The Symmetry of Fish:

“In her debut collection, The Symmetry of Fish, Su Cho presents us with a speaker who attempts to separate seemingly unlike things: the religious and flippant, the fishbone from the flesh, herself from her memories. In one poem Cho writes of a desire ‘to isolate these moments / pipette them into test tubes / whirl them in a centrifuge.’ Lucky for us, this turns out to be an impossible endeavor. Instead, we are graced with a glorious combination of the incompatible—Slim Jim crosses are treated with same reverence befitting any sacred relic. The speaker manages to be both an objective observer—recording the stories of family, friends, ghosts—and an unintentional catalyst—dropping an armful of fruit or choking on a fishbone and disrupting the silence of a moment, putting her own mark on the memory. ‘This is a collection of accidents,’ Su Cho writes in The Symmetry of Fish. I wouldn’t want it any other way.” —Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck